


A Short Rest

by TheCatWrites



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Complete, Everybody Dies, Gen, I'm Sorry, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 11:59:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8400859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCatWrites/pseuds/TheCatWrites
Summary: After leading the final battle to protect the world from Solas' plan to bring down the Veil, the Inquisitor finds herself among her friends once more.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I saw a photo and got smacked in the head by a feels pigeon so now you all have to suffer with me. Quizzy's race/class left undefined so readers can imagine any F!Quizzy who romanced Cullen filling the role.

“Hello again, my love,” the Inquisitor murmured, standing before the slab of polished marble in the graveyard just outside the walls of Skyhold. The mountain fortress’ shadow was just starting to creep over the rolling hill covered in stones and mausoleums as the sun crept past its zenith, shading the oldest section of the large cemetery. The weather was beautiful, clear and warm with a cooling breeze coming down off the snow-covered peaks nearby, marred only slightly by the flakes of ash and cinders drifting through the air from the burning destruction that remained of the keep.

Fitting, really, that the final confrontation should have taken place at the only home where she’d ever found true happiness. Skyhold had been returned to a state of ruin during the battle, worse even than the condition in which the fledgling Inquisition had taken possession of it so many years ago. Her tower suite was gone, toppled by a fireball summoned to crush an entire division of troops, and the gatehouse had been gutted by a Fade rift opening inside it, green flame chewing out the insides and leaving it hollow. There was a huge breach in one of the walls as well, and if she looked back over her shoulder she could see through it the body of the monster that had caused much of the damage, lying where she’d felled him.

Shaking her head, she tore her gaze from the battlefield, still swarming with soldiers as small pockets of fighters noticed that her adversary had been defeated and her soldiers either dispatched their enemies or accepted their surrender. She’d slain the beast not five minutes before, leaving the beautiful left hand Dagna had crafted for her, a work of enchantment that was as much art as it was functional, shattered into pieces inside his ribcage. As she’d watched the last breath leave his body, it was like something inside her came untethered, floating of its own accord and pulling her after it across the muddied lawns and through the overgrown Chantry garden to the spot where she now stood.

The memory of the first time she’d stood in the same place burned bright in her mind like a hot coal held against bare skin. A bare six months married and already a widow by the hand of an assassin meant for her, she’d knelt before the fresh grave as the other mourners filed away by ones and twos, unmoving, unfeeling, ignoring the sunset as the lights from Josephine’s reception shone through the massive stained glass windows behind the throne to outline her form, still and silent as the stone that now lay between her and her husband. In the morning she’d stood, walked down to the smithy in the Undercroft, and asked Dagna to help her kill a god.

Dagna was gone, now, taken in the sixth Blight. All the arcane knowledge in the world did no good against a wound from a Darkspawn’s blade. Blackwall - and he’d always be Blackwall to her, never Thom - had taken the Joining proper when the sixth Archdemon rose, and made a Warden’s ultimate sacrifice, plunging his blade into the dragon’s neck and pulling the Old God’s soul into himself. His grave, surmounted by his Warden armor cast in bronze, stood next to the Arcanist’s runed headstone, so that they could have the closeness in death that had been denied them by the events of their lives.

Nearly all who’d stood against the Archdemon in that battle lay beneath the walls of Skyhold. A red stone inlaid with a brass bow and arrow and a compass rose marked where Sera and Scout Harding shared their rest. Cassandra’s simple granite rectangle was carved with the all-seeing eye of the order of Seekers of Truth that she had rebuilt from the ground up. Leliana’s grave bore neither name nor dates, merely an etched silhouette of a nightingale so that when all those who remembered her were gone she would remain truly anonymous. Vivienne’s mausoleum was by far the most ornate memorial on the grounds, a tiny recreation of the Winter Palace’s façade adorning each side. Dorian and Iron Bull lay beneath an artfully depicted mosaic of a Tevinter serpent speared on the horns of a bull, a last hilarious pun laid out in their joint will which the Inquisitor, as executor, had _almost_ not let them get away with.

Cole’s grave lay empty, as there’d been no body to bury after he was banished by the careless wave of an ancient Elf’s hand. The connection he’d had to the physical world, which they’d all thought so strong, proved to be nothing in the face of someone so powerful and adept in manipulating spirits and the Fade. There’d almost been no funeral, but Varric had insisted, footing the bill himself from Kirkwall’s coffers to commission a statue of a young man in a floppy hat giving water to a wounded soldier. Those same funds had paid for the services of an Orzammar Stoneshaper to carve the runes of memory into the lazurite sculpture of a book that held a spiky Kirkwall Viscount’s circlet sized for a Dwarven head inlaid at its base.

Sudden fatigue washed over the Inquisitor’s body, and a sense of a heavy weight pressing down, like all the years behind her had taken on physical form. Painfully slow, like each small movement had to be carefully planned out before it could happen, she knelt, then put her hands down, then stretched out atop the marble slab in front of her, feeling the cool stone against her cheek, fingers of her right hand brushing over the name carved at the top: _Cullen Stanton Rutherford, First Commander of the Inquisition, b 9:11 - d 9:45 Dragon._

There would be people looking for her by now. After any battle, even one as momentous as the one she’d just finished, the leaders of the victorious force had much to discuss. Her Generals were efficient, the best in the world, and would no doubt be finished gathering their divisions, assigning officers to begin preliminary casualty reports, diverting resources to the infirmaries and letting the medics comb the field for the injured. They’d need her signature on any number of authorizations and official documents. She could get up and go to them… _should_ , really. But she was so tired, and she just wanted to lie still in the shade with her husband for a short while. It had been so long. They’d probably find her in a few minutes. She closed her eyes. Just a short rest.

_It was, all reports agreed, the largest single mass illusion in history, remarkable both in the number of individuals affected and in the consistency of the vision reported across all witnesses. All present for the event narrate their visions in the exact same way: A golden light passing over Skyhold, washing away all evidence of the recent battle, showing the fortress as it looked many years before when it was an active center of the Inquisition’s power. The sun racing across the sky until it was nearly setting behind the mountains, lights coming on all over the walls and the keep, sounds of celebration rising from within. A feeling of peace, of contentment, of being home at last. And a whispered exchange, heard clearly as if directed personally to each listener there:_

_“If I’m not mistaken, we finally have some time.”  
_

_“Yes, my love. We have all the time in the world.”  
_

_It is yet to be proven whether this event had anything to do with the subsequent discovery of the unusual circumstances of the Inquisitor’s death, her body having been found turned to marble atop her late husband’s grave, fused to the slab as though carved from the same block of stone._

_\- Excerpt from A History of the Inquisition, Volume 5: The Eighth Blight, by King Loghain Theirin II_


End file.
